Ren Ng Shares His Photographic Vision: Shoot Now, Focus Later

Ren Ng, the founder of Lytro, is passionate about light field photography and making the technology available to consumers. Photo: Christina Bonnington/Wired.com

After buying his first digital camera, Ren Ng tried to snap a shot of a family friend’s vivacious 5-year-old daughter. Like many young, active children, it was incredibly difficult to focus the image properly and capture her fleeting smile in just the right way.

And then it came to him — what if you could take a picture, and then adjust the focus later?

That’s the story behind Ng’s startup Lytro and its revolutionary plenoptic camera, which lets users adjust the focus of a photograph after the fact thanks to an array of micro-lenses over the camera’s sensor. The result is a remarkable “living picture” (an example of which is included below. You can click around to change the focus of the image).

“There’s something about light field photography that’s just magical,” Ng says. “It very much is photography as we’ve known it. It’s what we’ve always seen through cameras — we just had to fix it. We’ve had these kind of pictures floating on our retinas, for as long as we’ve been humans.”

The implications for light field technology are very broad; they’re not just limited to consumer photography and picture taking. There are medical and scientific applications, for instance with microscopy, which is currently being studied at Stanford. It could also be used in industrial settings. “Anywhere that you need to take a picture and you have a lens in front of a sensor, you can do new things,” Ng says. Of course, 31-year-old Ng loves how light field photographs can capture a bigger picture of an event than conventional cameras. Not in the size sense; in the informational sense.

Ng was doing theoretical research at Stanford University in light fields at the time he tried to photograph his friend’s daughter. After sitting in on a research meeting discussing the design of a light field camera (which was formerly composed of an array of about a hundred digital cameras attached to a supercomputer when the technology was first introduced in the 90s), he thought to himself, “That sounds really cool, but that’s not going to be very practical.”

So Ng was prompted to switch his emphasis to cameras, specifically how he could shrink light field technology down into a commercial-size package. He spent time studying optics and working with electrical and mechanical engineering professors to put the camera together, since as a computer science student, he didn’t have that training.

After getting his Ph.D. (and receiving honors like the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award in the process), Ng set out to put his research to use by starting a company that would produce light field cameras that everyone could enjoy. Four years later, Ng’s solo endeavor has expanded to over 45 employees, and his “competitively priced” camera will be available to consumers later this year.

Ng explains that these light field photographs are the same as what we had in the past, but now they have a bit more life, and this opens up all new kinds of creative avenues. The picture can tell a story.

“I just love taking pictures,” says Ng.

Light field cameras provide higher performance at a lower cost than could ever be possible in the past. However, details like the exact megapixel count and storage size of photographs taken with Lytro’s camera (and its exact price) are still under wraps until the product officially launches.

A Lytro camera, hidden under the furry shell of a stuffed animal shark, snaps images of guests and circus performers at the company's launch party.

“The megapixel war in conventional cameras has been a total myth,” Ng says. “It’s taking us all in the wrong direction. Once a picture goes online, you’re throwing away 95 to 98 percent of those pixels. Light fields can use all that resolution, those megapixels, harness them, and drive them into the future.”

Light field technology simplifies the hardware of a camera, since the processing is all done with advanced software. But the resulting interactive images don’t require any dedicated software. Lytro integrates HTML5, Flash and other native app technologies to create a simple, unified experience that anyone can view or work with. The company does have a Facebook app coming out soon, though.

So will we be seeing Lytro’s light field technology anywhere else soon, say in smartphones?

“Smartphone technology is very important and is directly applicable to light field technology, but as a startup, our focus at this stage is just on our own camera for now,” Ng says.

Although partnerships with existing camera or smartphone manufacturers is potentially quite a ways off, at least we can look forward to Lytro’s camera later this year.